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Tag Archives: puns

Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner is Mike Emmons, who solved nineteen out of twenty riddles. He gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Mike! Below, the solutions. Read More

Every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks.The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.)Send an e-mail with your answers to contests@theparisreview.org. The deadline is Monday, August 1,when we’ll post the answers. Good luck!

The answers to this month’s puzzle are surnames composed, either plainly or fancifully, of two words. Lots of people, of course, such as the installation artist Jessica Stockholder and the bandleader Benny Goodman, have phrasal surnames, but we’ve generally avoided names that are themselves compound words or common pairings. Several of the answers, then, form sensible if unusual phrases; others are of the word-salad type. The answers are simply the surnames, though each is attached to a notable figure, including two fictional characters. The clues consist of a parenthetical, usually just naming the field in which the person became most famous, followed by a two-word phrase roughly synonymous with the phrasal surname. (One clue uses an established hyphenated compound word, but that seems in keeping with the two-word rule.) So, if we had used one of the above rejects, the clue might go as follows:

(Clarinetist) Decent fellow

The answer would be “Goodman.” If you want to throw in a first name, feel free, but you won’t get extra points. Read More

Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Russell Jane Willoughby, who got out thirty-seven of forty really difficult hink pinks. She gets a free subscription to the Review and a copy of Dylan’s new novel, Amateurs. Congratulations, Russell! Below, the solutions.

Ed. Note: every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks.The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review and a copy of Dylan’s new novel, Amateurs. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.)Send an e-mail with your answers to contests@theparisreview.org. The deadline is Friday, July 1,at noon EST, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! Read More

Ed. Note: last week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Jonathan Harkey, who got twenty-five out of thirty malapropisms. He gets a free subscription to the Review and a copy of Dylan’s new novel, Amateurs. Congratulations, Jonathan! Below, the solutions. Read More

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Ed. Note: every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks.The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review and a copy of Dylan’s new novel, Amateurs. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.)Send an e-mail with your answers to contests@theparisreview.org. The deadline is Thursday, May 26,at noon EST, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck!

Mrs. Malaprop is the pompous aunt in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy, The Rivals, and the eponym for the word malapropism. As one of her relations puts it in the play, she’s known for her use of “words so ingeniously misapplied, without being mispronounced.” Repeatedly and obliviously, she reaches for a high-flown word but comes out with a similar sounding, contextually nonsensical or ludicrous one—appellation, for example, becomes compilation; alligator morphs into allegory.

Each sentence in this month’s puzzle contains a malapropism. Your task is to identify the misapplied and intended words. As in The Rivals, the confused words are occasionally out-and-out rhymes, but most are more subtly alike in sound. For illustration, we’ll quote two of Mrs. Malaprop’s lines:

But the point we would request of you is, that you will promise to forget this fellow—to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

He is the very pine-apple of politeness.

Were those quotations part of our puzzle, correct answers would read something like this:

Illiterate should be obliterate.

Pine-apple should be pinnacle.

Or you might right “illiterate = obliterate,” or “Not ‘pine-apple, you silly, ‘pinnacle!’ ”—unlike Alex Trebek, we’re not sticklers about how you phrase your answers, though you do need to include both words in each answer. As always, the first person to submit a complete set of correct answers—or, in the event that no one achieves that, the person who submits the most correct answers—wins a free Paris Review conscription. Read More